Presidential Candidate Joe Biden and the Flap Du Jour

The flap du jour in the major media concerns the remarks of newly announced presidential candidate Joe Biden. Biden's entry into the presidential race came with a bang, not a whimper, but Biden's bang was the kind any presidential candidate can do without. And that was only the first day of Biden's campaign. He announced his candidacy on January 31. There are signs that the Biden campaign may not survive the first week in February.

ABC and CBS immediately aired the texts of Biden's commentary on Barak Obama's candidacy. There will no doubt be web-crawling insinuations that Biden's description was scripted by the 'Republican Attack Machine, but Biden's first day as a presidential candidate couldn't have been worse.

He described Hilary Clinton's foreign policy pronouncements as 'confused', John Edwards as a 'blow-dry' candidate, and Barak Obama as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate, and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook man."

Later in the evening of his announcement on Wednesday, Biden had a date scheduled on the Jon Stewart show. Stewart pinned the abashed candidate to the wall almost immediately and Biden was subjected to the kind of laughter that is closer to ridicule than fun. On February 1, the big networks assembled their chiefs for a foray into political punditry. On ABC television, George Stephanopoulos mused that candidate Biden was the first candidate who could go through the cycle of gaffe, apology, and appearance on late night comedy shows all in one day.

Another network featured a long film clip of candidate John Edwards painstakingly combing his hair while holding the make-up girl's compact mirror. Barak Obama shrugged off Biden's remarks at first, but came up with a formal statement later in the day. Obama rightly pointed out the contributions made by a host of other African Americans like Al Sharpton previous to Obama's candidacy.